This invention relates to ready access cabinets and, more particularly, to a protective cabinet that is useful in storing emergency gear, such as breathing apparatus, that may be readily opened to provide immediate access to the emergency device.
It is common practice to store emergency gear in tamperproof containers to prevent theft or accidental damage which would make the apparatus either unavailable or nonfunctional when needed. Such devices include fire-fighting apparatus such as fire extinguishers, hoses, axes, emergency breathing apparatus, fire blankets and the like. The cabinets in which this gear is stored generally have some sort of frangible lock to protect the contents from vandalism and indicate when the door of the cabinet has been opened. These locks may be in the form of an easily broken seal or a small glass plate that is broken to obtain access to the door handle. Frequently, these cabinets are recessed into the wall of a building.
Protective cabinets of the type with which this invention is concerned may prove difficult to open in emergency situations when people are acting under extreme stress, and further, unless the cabinets are suitably dimensioned, it may be difficult to remove emergency gear in a minimum amount of time.
Of special criticality are air-breathing packs and similar devices that are adapted to be carried on the back of an emergency worker. Since these depend on the worker's inserting his arms through a shoulder harness, it may be difficult and wasteful of precious seconds to adjust the shoulder harness, and frequently it requires a coworker to help adjust the backpack. To avoid this particular problem, a number of mounting devices have been suggested in the prior art (see, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,204,755; 3,490,727; and 3,547,391) that utilize mounting brackets that permit the emergency worker to back up to the supported device, slip his arms through the shoulder harness, and then release the device from its bracket by walking away from it. However, to fully utilize these devices, the mounting brackets should be fully accessible and not stored within the recess of a cabinet.
Thus, conventional cabinets housing emergency equipment suffer from the difficulty that they may be hard to open under times of stress and in that even when open, the emergency gear is recessed into the cabinet, making access to the gear, and particularly fastening it to the body, as with a harness, difficult.